Flutterby™! : Alternative photography processes 2009-10-19 17:07:55.83629+00

Alternative photography processes

2009-10-19 17:07:55.83629+00 by Dan Lyke 7 comments

CJ continues taunting me with cool photography things to do: Alternative Photography processes.

#Comment Re: made: 2009-10-19 17:18:08.067636+00 by: Chris in Florida

I would not describe my intent as to taunt, rather to share, inform, inspire and shame into action :)

Charlene's DD brother is here this week, my Mom arrives on Wednesday and stays through the weekend, and when all of that is over I need to finish sealing the vapor barrier in the basement (it rained today...), and then get back into the shop.

However, if my Dad does send along that Speed Graphic think I need a fedora and one of those hand-held platforms with flash powder in it to go along with it.

I'm thinking of getting my legacy Canon A5 film camera out and shooting side-by-side with my digital bodies.

On a semi-related topic, I see that both Nikon and Canon have pushed expanded ISO settings to over ISO 100K. That means we're barely more than 3 stops from expanded ISO over 1M. I wonder what types of alternative photography that will allow?

Jeff, Charlene's been getting into astronomy recently, and based on your awesome moon/Saturn/Jupiter picture I've started to think that with things like this the tack to take might be to build whatever observing we set up around a good telescope mount that can swing an SLR around and a Canon 1D MKIV.

#Comment Re: made: 2009-10-20 19:42:54.857635+00 by: jeff [edit history]

Dan, interestingly enough, I had read part of Vincent's blog and viewed that same short video early this morning. It's amazing where we're at now, and what the next few years will bring.

Thanks for the compliment. The montage that I put together of the moon, Jupiter, and Saturn was shot unguided on a tripod with my old 8mp Canon 20D, my Canon 400mm F5.6 prime, and a Canon 2xTC, some six years ago. You can do ALL KINDS of wide-field astrophotography with a just a good mount, consumer-grade lenses, and a decent DSLR--not to mention that new awesome Canon 1Dmk4 (APS-H sensor). The 1Dsmk4 (full-frame sensor) will likely follow in the Spring (expect 30+ megapixels).

I may be trying some astrophotography with my new Canon 7D on some borrowed mounts later this fall. Living in Ohio (with all of the light pollution), I just haven't been able to justify the cost of a really good mount yet. I've been very much tempted to do so from time-to-time, though. The 7D is an 18mp 1.6x crop camera (APS-C sensor), so that provides a bonus of some additional reach over the other sensors (notwithstanding pixel density). It has expanded ISO to 12.8K, but I think it's pretty noisy at that point.

That's very cool that Charlene is getting into astronomy and possibly some astrophotography as well.

#Comment Re: made: 2009-10-22 00:03:12.494886+00 by: Chris in Florida

If the Speed Graphic shows up, my offer is still good, when you get ready to engage in some wet processing, I will send you some stainless steel film hangers, you can use Tupperware for the tanks, provided you do it in total darkness.

RE: Astrophotography. For planetary subject matter, I may try to use the 7D for video stacking of high quality HD 1080p frames in order to increase the overall SNR of a resulting composite image. A lot of folks have been doing that for quite some time with cheap and noisy digicams with fairly good results.

I just started experimenting with 7D video over the past couple of days. Here are two short video clips: